Ten Seconds Until the End of the World
by Scarabbug
Summary: The world comes to an end, and the Justice League can do absolutely nothing about it. Seriously, they can’t. [Very vague spoilers for the comic books’ Infinite Crisis series. Oneshot.]


**Very vague spoilers for the comic books' _Infinite Crisis _series.**

**This fic originated from the concept that the DCAU was one of the many billions of years created (and destroyed) by Alexander Luthor during _Infinite Crisis_, but it's not really necessary to have read Infinite crisis in order to understand this. At all. it really isn't…**

**Oh alright, so maybe you _do_ need to have read it. Mostly. Reviews and concrit are appreciated.

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_"This is the way the world ends,_ _this is the way the world ends, t__his is the way the world ends, __not with a bang but a whimper."_

-Eliot.

Ten Seconds Until the End of the World.

This is the way the world ends.

There is no bang. There are no whimpers. There isn't even an advance warning –or at least, not one that he can be aware of.

That's the strangest thing, the thing he wasn't prepared for: there is _always_ a warning: a cry, a claxon, a recorded message with people in masks and heavy handed demands, _something_. Not this time. Not ever again. Maybe someone or something tried to warn him, and if they did, then he appreciates the gesture even if it's a pointless one.

There is no signal sent to him from some faraway psychic intellect, or complicated psychological prediction from the future, telling them how to prepare for the inevitable. The inevitable quite simply _occurs_ and is not courteous enough to announce its arrival with explosions or signs.

The only warning he has that the world is ending is the silence. Endless, eternal. It _felt_ eternal anyway. Equal to the space between the words in one of his newspaper articles and the distance between here and the Source wall in the same breath.

Outside of his apartment window, cars squat still against the sidewalk like fat, still beetles. The air is cold in metropolis this morning. The sun is supposed to be rising in just a few moments, but the world is not awake yet, and never will be again.

The writer in him would have liked to remember the moment and copy it down. Preserve the last instant as he saw it.

Naturally, though, there wasn't any time for that.

_**No. Not right. This one isn't right at all. who does he think he is? who? What? Where? Why. **_

_**Go **_**away.

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**

The stone sentinels are speaking tonight, the gargoyles trying to tell him something, but he's never believed in those kinds of false notions. They're rock. There is no such thing as a coincidence or fortune or stones that speak, not even in Gotham. Not even in a world like his where you would have believed anything was possible if only an alien immigrant told you it happened.

Anything. Even the world's disappearance's starting with the fields on his computer. It could easily be a glitch in the system, a brief flicker of bad coding. But it isn't. It is the beginning of the world's end. No detective can deduce their way out of that.

'_There are always trade off. _You_ all are _my_ trade off. Bruce Wayne.' _

Father, son, bat, child in animal's clothing, too-old-too-soon, flyer, Bruce, pretender, baby, Brucie, faker, player, pearl grasper, bat, detective, gunshot, Wayne, bat, Bruce Wayne. For just the briefest glimmer of a second, he _knows_ exactly who and what he is, and what that means. He solves the greatest crime that has ever existed and there shall be no one to know of it.

Then there is nothing more to know at all.

The gargoyles don't scream, but he wishes they would. And then he doesn't wish anything.

_**Forever in an instant… what power this is… but still, you did not remember my earth, World's Greatest Detective.

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**_

She is the most beautiful woman on earth.

_This _earth.

The most powerful, also. The Greatest Warrior of all, though there _have_ been challengers to that title: challengers whom she is proud to call her allies and loathe to call enemies. The gods would offer to spare her from the apocalypse if they had the capacity. She senses that is what they will do. But they don't.

They don't, because they no longer exist. They disappear long before mankind. Perhaps they tried to run away and were caught up in the end of it. Thymiscria is gone and man's world has become a white, blankness, so she stands alone on the bank of the Styx, because that was where she felt she should go, and then of course, even hell itself is ripped away from beneath her. There is no Hades, Zeus or Ares. There is no Athena. They have all been devoured by a force greater than all of their legends put together.

Their offers are not things she would have accepted anyway. She forgets their stories and tales, as the world and existence collapses all around her.

All this occurs in less than ten seconds. She had no idea who she should pray to. She can't remember the goddess's name.

_**There is too much fire in her. No. For all her beauty, she is not the one.

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**_

He has watched planets burn and seen species die. (It happens. It's wrong, it's bad, but it happens anyway.) He's watched the world crumble, but he could always think that there are _more_ of them. More worlds, more people in need of protection and rescue. Karma balances out the realities and holds them there ready for anyone with the creativity to reach them.

The ring was proof that he had that, but the ring means nothing.

Now, however, there's nothing. Maybe there wasn't anything there in the first place. Maybe the corps. and the are all like one big clay sculpture, and here comes the water to wash it away. Except that water is oblivion, and that's a cerebral-oriented word of a depth he's never even imaged himself using before, not even when things were at their worst and they all had to be held accountable for it.

The end of the world is… brighter, lighter, paler than he expected it to be.

_**Forget Karma. You are of no use to me. **_

He thinks of Shayera.

One way or another, that means he gets the last word in.

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The end of the world is a blip. Nothing more. 

Which just… It figures, really. It lives up to all her expectations, or lack thereof.

It could not have been anticipated by anyone bar a few. She is not one of those few. But still,. It seems as if she was always ready for it to come at any given second, and when it does, she almost has the time to spread her wings and meet it head on. Ten seconds, and she is elegant in her defiance. She flies. _Begins_ to fly. Or perhaps she was already flying. It doesn't matter. Her world is torn up like paper feathers and that is all there is and ever was. The End. Goodbye. As solid as the rock of a cliff face where she once stood with a baby in her arms.

You should make the most of what you have. There is nothing more. Be happy at the end, like Solomon Grundy, but not because of _faith_. Be happy because you have—

_**Your almost-flight believes in itself alone, impostor. Disappear.

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**_

So. Yeah.

He figures that he probably should have taken the hint when the guy standing on the corner of West Street, brandishing the "END IS NIGH!" placard had started counting backwards from fifty.

But for crying out loud, the Mayan calendar (yes he does know that kind of stuff though a fat lot of good that does them _now_) hasn't even run out yet, and even if it had, it isn't like they haven't stopped this kind of thing as million timed before, advance warning or no advance warning and… he knows how many times it was luck and how many times it was due to the fact that they're just damn _good _at saving the world.

Normally that would've been enough time for him to accomplish just about _anything_… had he actually known in the first place what it was he needed to do.

He didn't know. And so twenty seconds came and went, and when they went, the world went with them. Existence has they know it is sucked into a deep, white space that churns for a moment, and then is still and… Nothing. Just nothing. It breaks like so many half eaten crackers.

That twenty seconds is an eternity, as far as the Flash is concerned. An eternity in which he could have found Superman and Bats and Wonder Woman and Shayera and John and told them what was happening so that they could all… Wait. No. He's forgetting – they don't _live_ at the speeds he's capable of, they couldn't save the world in that time, and there's nothing he can do alone, not in a moment, not in twenty of them. not even _him_.

That thought scares him, so he ignores it. He pretends to enjoy the last second.

The others… they've never understood. There's nothing unbelievable about size or distance. Humans just have this annoying tendency to believe that there is something incredible about circling Australia a thousand times in a minute. There isn't. there really isn't.

He doesn't realise it, right now, but he is closest to the core: the epicentre where everything happened and something brought the world to an end. Because he goes so fast he can almost touch it. The hands of something bigger-than-all close around them all and _crush_, but nobody sees that of course. They're moving much too slowly.

They say that you think about you life in your very last moment, and you see it all in fast forward. Wally has the time to see it all in _slow motion_ and _high definition_. He lives out his life as fast as he can live it. Circles the space where the globe should be several billion times, catches a glimpse of himself on the return. Then he lives it out even faster than that, and by the time it's over there is no more world, there is no more.

He is faster than any creature has ever been before. He can outrun death, but he can't outrun reality.

Before he dies, he thinks, for a moment, that he's going so fast that time itself catches a glimpse of him. _Beautiful_, it calls him. _I am sorry. _

Or maybe that's his imaginat—

_**No, no, no, no, no.

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**_

The deaths of his family were physical. Solid. And their graves were tangible, before time and age turned them to dust.

Now there are no graves. There is no death. Not truly. The silence he gains instead is equal to the distance the Flash could run without drawing a breath, or as far as Shayera could swing her mace. It lasts so long he can almost trick himself into believing this is a good thing.

No voices in his head. No anger, no complaints, no rage, no deception or greed or humanity, the bits of them he despises are vanishing in the whiteness and haze. There are a few thoughts that creep through the cracks of the broken world – a voice that belongs to a strong body with equally strong hands, the size of a galaxy. No, greater still than that. The Martian gods, even dead as they are, could not lay a hand upon it.

'No, all wrong. Destroy it all and start again, destroy it all.'

It's almost paradise.

Almost. For the moment before

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End file.
